Helle Stangerup

The Gallery of Fate

Helle Stangerup received much critical acclaim for her latest novel, Skæbnegalleriet (The Gallery of Fate), about the painter Holbein and his life among princes and thinkers in sixteenth-century Europe.
 

By Mette Winge. Translated by Barbara J. Haveland
 

Two threads run through Helle Stangerup’s work: a crime strand and a historical strand.  She began her writing career with a number of brilliantly constructed crime novels.  The first, entitled Gravskrift for Rødhætte (Epitaph for Red Riding Hood,1967), was set in and around an airport.  But it was with her second book Gule handsker (Yellow Gloves, 1968) that she made her big popular breaksthrough and subsequent novels in this genre were all warmly received by her readers.

Then Helle Stangerup changed track, turning her hand to historical fiction.  Stangerup’s subjects are always meticulously researched - there is no short-changing here, with regard to the little details or to the broader historical picture.  Christine (In the Courts of Power, 1985) was an enormous success and won her the Danish Booksellers’ Golden Laurels award.  Spardame (Queen of Spades, 1989) and Sankt Markus Nat (St Mark’s Night, 1992) also became best-sellers.

In 2006 came ’The Gallery of Fate’, a major, brilliantly researched novel which takes as its central character the great painter Hans Holbein the Younger.

Holbein, who lived from 1497-1543, studied in Augsburg and Basel, worked for some time in England, then on the continent again, before ending his career and his life in London, where he died in 1543.

These were turbulent times, harsh and violent; and, inevitably, when you moved in the same circles as kings and courtiers you also found yourself surrounded by all the countless, secret intrigues of the court - it was almost impossible to avoid being drawn into them.  And when the king was Henry VIII this could be downright dangerous.  Especially when the king’s wives themselves threaten to become a nasty nail in Holbein’s coffin.

During his first sojourn in England Holbein developed a close relationship with Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia – a man of great integrity who refused to compromise his faith or his ideals: a stance which was to cost him his head.  His assocation with the More family proves a dangerous one for Holbein, and through it he becomes embroiled in an almost inextricable web of intrigue.

Holbein, or Hans, as we know him in the novel, is the foremost painter of his age.  He paints the king, he paints nobles, he paints ambassadors.  And he is also commissioned to paint those European princesses - the lovely and the less so - whom the spin doctors of the day consider promising wife material for the somewhat unstable king.  His greatest challenge was to paint the portrait of Anne of Cleves, whom certain people felt would be right for the king, and Holbein comes close to compromising his own artistic principles in portraying her as being relatively handsome and attractive – which she was not.  Indeed the king threw one of his violent fits of temper on seeing her ’in the flesh’, and the marriage was speedily dissolved.

So the life of a court painter was not without its risks.  It was also a hard life, and the reader is given a marvellous and richly detailed insight into the mind of an artist and his taxing day-to-day work.

Holbein lives in the centre of London, and the life of the city – the crowds of people, the rats, the poverty - punctuated by the sound of the cannon announcing that yet another soul has had their head chopped off, is depicted with tremendous verve and pinpoint accuracy by Helle Stangerup.  And the boom of those cannon forms an effective and chilling backdrop to this portrayal of Holbein’s life.

Painting: Detail from 'The Ambassadors' of Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533